Social Sensory Somatic Scores for Species, Spaces, Soils, and Structures of Steep Slopes

Abstract

Modern knowledge systems have physically and conceptually “flattened” the world, erasing the ecological, political, and sensory complexities inherent to sloped terrain. By attending closely to the slope—as both a material condition and a generative metaphor—this thesis foregrounds movement as a form of resistance to regimes of exploitation, abstraction, and estrangement that have historically transformed land into data and place into property. Weaving together interdisciplinary methodologies from performance studies, landscape architecture theory, feminist geography, ecological theology, environmental history, sensory ethnography, and media studies, SSSSSSSSSS dances an inclined methodological structure, oscillating deliberately between critical systemic analysis and situated sensory experience. Ch1. sets the stage among steep slopes and introduces the discipline to movement as pedagogy, enacting the urgency for new methodologies into schemes of the project’s medium and the book’s format. Ch.2 is a feminist investigation of the ways modern infrastructures and spaces have been designed to reinforce land abstraction and commodification in the name of improvement-- severing embodied relationality, contributing to societal apathy toward ecological and social crises. Imperial post-enlightenment statecraft, the suppression of wildness, and the standardization of level form have flattened our upright movements to enact a state of senslessness. Contradicting Ch.2’s straight critique, Ch.3 attempts to reweave the sinuous nuance of symbiogenesis between soils and species, revealing that humans are but one among many sloped organisms moving, and inclining, and co-evolving as the lithosphere; we have been slorgs all along. Slorgs belong to divine mythologies of terrain’s elevations and have reciprocated in admiration, mimicking topographic spatial functions and adorning the summits with artistic interventions--some inadvertently contributing to the damaging regimes of Ch.2. Interwoven through both chapters, outliers resisting those forces of governance and exploitation are often those displaced by them-- those moving in ways the system polices and erases from comprehension-- refugees, queers, witches, tricksters, artists, herbalists, and healers. The intended medium of SSSSSSSSSS coalesces in Ch.4: inviting the general public to participatory happenings with hills, composing scores, coaxing their inner slorgs to slither askew, sloping themselves as moving loci for sympoietic becoming. Multi-species attune to a social, sensed, somatic experience, co-composing spatial relations among local steep soils. Slorgs challenge the abstractions of dominant epistemologies in the temporal, situated act of trusting their own proprioception in collective balance, affirming the multidimensional value of embodied, ecological geo-choreography. Social Sensory Somatic Scores for Soils, Structures, Spaces, and Species of Steep Slopes are presented through photographs in Ch.4 and in moving image, available as supplemental material.